Born in Ségou, Mali, Oxmo Puccino would go on to be greatly influenced by the African country's cultural sensibility as a youth before moving to France at the age of five. Going on to become enamored with hip-hop, Diarra would begin a fruitful collaboration with the Paris-based rap collective Time Bomb in the early-1990s. Eventually releasing his debut album, Pucc. Fiction, in 1996, the LP's poetic portraits of life in urban Paris helped establish Punccio as one of the more capable rappers of his generation.
